The Weeping Silver Lime of Park Schothorst

This tree carries two different kinds of leaf and you can find both from where you stand. It is a grafted weeping lime. The weeping form, 'Petiolaris', cannot be grown from seed and is joined onto an ordinary lime rootstock, which means the tree is really two plants sharing a trunk. Above the graft the branches arch out and hang down, carrying leaves on unusually long stalks that let each one swing and show its white felted underside. Below the graft the rootstock keeps sending up its own shoots, and those carry plain lime leaves on short stalks. Look low on the trunk for ordinary foliage and up into the hanging branches for the long-stalked kind. The register also notes the root flare, which is unusually pronounced and which people walk over constantly, and adds that the tree seems to be standing up to it. That is an honest way of saying it is being slowly damaged and is winning anyway. It is at the back of Park Schothorst on the edge of the wood, banded 1830 to 1840. Come in July. Silver limes flower late, and the scent of one this size carries a long way through a wood.